Breadboardable WS2812 LEDs

Hackaday sees a ton of projects featuring the WS2812 series of digitally controllable RGB LEDs, in the form of bare chips, RGB LED strips, or some form of Adafruit’s NeoPixels. All these WS2812 LED products have one thing in common – they’re chip LEDs, making some projects difficult to realize. Now there’s a new member of the WS2812 family – a through-hole LED version – that should be available through the usual sources sometime later this year.

The key difference between these and the usual WS2812 LEDs is the packaging; these are 8mm LEDs with pins for power, ground, data in, and data out. With the preexisting libraries, this 8mm LED should work just the same as any other WS2812 LED.

Aside from a through-hole package, these new LEDs are very diffuse and aren’t as blinding as the normal chip LEDs. If you want to pick up a few of these LEDs, they’re available here, 13 LEDs for $15. There’s a lot of potential here for RGB LED cubes, something we hope to see sooner rather than later.

The ws2811 and ws2812 are slightly different in that the order of the colours in the three bytes are different IIRC. Probably the same chip but it was easier to wire the colours up differently when integrating the die with the led.

Cool!! I made myself a breakout board for the SMD square WS2812B. Figured others might want some so they’re on Tindie.com. You can find some other WS2812B goodies on there from other vendors. Not sure if anyone is carrying the thru-hole version though.